Tuesday, September 20, 2005

Bobbing Along

Is it rainy and grey where you are, too? Work day not quite going as you planned? I was faced with three options this morning in class: a) I am a boring teacher, b) I am teaching something boring - hardly likely, as is Walt Whitman, or c) I have not thought of proper ways to wake students up to Whitman poetry at 8:30am. Am telling self that c) is the most hopeful option, so will try to think of more electrifying pedagogic style better-suited to ungodly hour.

Anyway, in spirit of humdrum day but also of remembering to laugh and smile about the humdrum and its relation to the beautiful, my colleague next door just gave me this copy of a poem she wrote. I love the way it laughs at itself for sublimating a bit of daily debris, and it's quite a funny poem in general, and kind of a deceptively sexy one (I think). In case it lifts your spirits, too, or makes you smile:

Rafting the Deerfield Riverby Elizabeth Libbey

Motorless. Loosed. Playing the current'sslow game. Rocks just below surfacemake the water seem to stand stillheartskips one long beat, feathers, sets itselfright again, freezing out of mind's driftthe unlikeliest object into significance.Take, for instance, this Clorox bottle

I float neck-and-neck with, will soon overtake:no sign, surely, from the Zeus I believemight still descend on me. Yet its emptinessfills with my remembering until ponderousmemory overtakes me: thirty years ago, seateddrunk with my lover beside the Iowa RiverI observed the miracle congeal out of noon's glare

opaque white upstream, bobbing on down,nodding its mythic head my way, grand asa blue ribbon float in the Tournament of Rosesparade ... surely Zeus has better thingsto do? More luminosity? I must have thoughtZeus dull drunk like us, that even a godas old as the sky needs a little safe harbor

now and then, that Zeus should paddle on over,follow my lover's example: snake his headdown into my lap. I couldn't breathe. To watchthose wings spread bank to bank! My lifewas all going to happen at once, no needto tread water, go down the third time, waitfor safe passage through parted watersI'd

just cross over on the wings of a deityas if some gentleman in a novel had stretchedhis overcoat across a puddle for me, andoffered his handraising his head, my lovetook one quick look, said, "Your swan's a used-up bottle of bleach," and oh, so likea boat adrift on the stream when it hits

the hard fact of bank, waking the sleeping onewho tips, then, over, flails in six inchesof water, I flailed free, came back to myselfundrowned. Hand loosed now like someirresistible fly in the current, I canfeel Poseidon rising famished to take it, takethis ponderous vessel, this surprise bride.

For that matter, *I* am not even remotely energized at 8:30. Maybe make them get up a couple of times during class for some reason and switch seats, or some such. One of those cheesy things you'd never do if the class met at a reasonable time.

I like to tell my students, as a last resort, that if I can't sleep or stare off vacantly into space, they can't either.

Reading the Bromance: Homosocial Relationships in Film and Television ($32/pbk). Ed. Michael DeAngelis. Wayne State University Press, 2014.
Academic pieces that dig into recent portraits in popular media, comic and dramatic, of intimacies between straight(ish) men. Includes the essay
"'I Love You, Hombre': Y tu mamá también as Border-Crossing Bromance" by Nick Davis, as well as chapters on Superbad, Humpday, Jackass, The Wire, and other texts. Written for a mixed audience of scholars, students, and non-campus readers. Forthcoming in June 2014. "Remarkably sophisticated essays." Janet Staiger, "Essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary models of gender and sexuality." Harry Benshoff

Fifty Key American Films ($31/pbk). Ed. Sabine Haenni, John White. Routledge, 2009. Includes my essays on
The Wild Party,
The Incredibles, and
Brokeback Mountain. Intended as both a newcomer's guide to the terrain
and a series of short, exploratory essays about such influential works as The Birth of a Nation, His Girl Friday, Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song,
Taxi Driver, Blade Runner, Daughters of the Dust, and Se7en.

The Cinema of Todd Haynes: All That Heaven
Allows ($25/pbk). Ed. James Morrison. Wallflower Press, via Columbia University Press, 2007. Includes the essay
"'The Invention of a People': Velvet Goldmine and the Unburying of Queer Desire" by Nick Davis, later expanded and revised in The Desiring-Image.
More, too, on Poison, Safe, Far From Heaven, and Haynes's other films by Alexandra Juhasz, Marcia Landy,
Todd McGowan, James Morrison, Anat Pick, and other scholars. "A collection as intellectually and emotionally
generous as Haynes' films" Patricia White, Swarthmore College

Film Studies:
The Basics ($23/pbk). By Amy Villarejo. Routledge, 2006, 2013. Award-winning
film scholar and teacher Amy Villarejo finally gives us the quick, smart, reader-friendly guide to film vocabulary that every
teacher, student, and movie enthusiast has been waiting for, as well as a one-stop primer in the past, present, and future of film production, exhibition,
circulation, and theory. Great glossary, wide-ranging examples, and utterly unpretentious prose that remains rigorous in its analysis;
the book commits itself at every turn to the artistry, politics, and accessibility of cinema.

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and yes, that means Actress trumps Actor!

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